Nimbus Records is a British record company based in Wyastone Leys that specialised in classical music recordings and were the first company in the UK to produce compact discs.

A central technical aspect of the company's recording philosophy was the early adoption of the Ambisonic surround sound system invented by a group of British researchers2 including mathematician and audio engineer Michael Gerzon. Recordings were made with a single-point microphone array developed by Dr. Jonathan Halliday, equivalent to a form of soundfield microphone, encoded in the stereo-compatible 2-channel Ambisonic UHJ Format and released on conventional stereo media.

To experience such recordings in their truest form of surround sound requires an Ambisonic decoder, a type of equipment that has never been widely available, so Nimbus recordings are generally heard as unencoded UHJ, which is compatible with normal stereo playback.

The emergence of home theatre systems with an increasing emphasis on surround playback provides opportunities for home listeners to experience at least some of Nimbus' many Ambisonic recordings in their original state. For example, the company released a series of ‘DVD Music’ recordings in which the original 2-channel UHJ master discs have been decoded and flipped onto conventional DVD-Audio/Video surround format discs. In addition, Nimbus recordings have often been recorded in Ambisonic B format, which can be decoded directly to a surround format compatible with conventional multi-channel discs such as DVD or DTS-CD.

Nimbus Records was the first company to master and press compact discs in the UK, and developed and sold equipment to play them. It became part of the Mirror Group in 1987. Following the demise of Robert Maxwell, the equipment company was spun off and the intellectual property rights to the Nimbus Records catalogue were eventually reacquired by the original owners under the name Wyastone Estate Limited, which operates Wyastone Business Park, Wyastone Concert Hall and Nimbus Foundation, Nimbus Records and Nimbus Disc On Demand. The latter is a short-run record manufacturing company that has enabled Nimbus Records to make available to record buyers virtually its entire catalogue of recordings from the earliest days.